A Tale for the Time Being

This is one of those books that only comes along every now and then. I savored it. And it also hit a number of my current interests: found objects, letters, bullying, physics Buddhism, the sea, diarists and Japan.

Ozeki, who happens to be a Zen Buddhist priest, tells an interwoven story about a diary that washes up inside a Hello Kitty lunch box on a Canadian beach. Along with the diary, written by a Japanese teenager named Nao, are letters from a World War II Kamikaze pilot and his watch. Nao also writes about her Buddhist nun great-grandmother. The finder of the diary, a writer also named Ruth who is also married to a man named Oliver just like Ozeki, is transfixed. The character Ruth spends her days deciphering and obsessing over Nao’s words, rather than working on her own memoir, and trying to figure out if Nao really existed. This book was so good that I dreamed about the characters.

I found myself double checking, to see if this book was in fact a novel and not a memoir. Part of me wanted it to be true.

One thing was certain, I didn’t want the book to end. I will be re-reading this sooner, rather than later.

Here’s an appealing excerpt for us bibliophiles: “They liked books, all books, but especially old ones, and their house was overflowing with them. There were books everywhere, stacked on shelves and piled on the floor, on chairs, on the stairway treads, but neither Ruth nor Oliver minded.”